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Do you need to produce a simple map graphic showing locations of "stuff going on" nationally or internationally, with no dependency on third-party services? If so, Pippa is for you.
Pippa uses Lulu to optionally remove overlaps among markers with an algorithm better than other open source options. The example below shows typical results.
Create a map. Optionally change drawing parameters. Add dots of any area using pixel
coordinates, latitude/longitude, and/or US zip codes for locations. Then fetch a blob
usable as an HTML img tag source or else write to a file in any format ImageMagick
supports (which is many!).
Maps also expose the underlying ImageMagick map image and provide access to both latitude/longitude to pixel coordinate conversion and the zip code database, which maps zips to latitude and longitude in addition to other interesting tidbits. This allows you to draw anything you like as an overlay, geocoded if you wish.
This is a very simple library. See the README on the repository home page for code examples. The embedded RDOC has more.
Note that the the Yard-generated docs at rubygems.org
miss dynamically created methods that rdoc doesn't. Docs generated during local installation
won't have this problem.
A map of all the US zip codes. This is intentionally cluttered for testing purposes. West Point, NY and Berkeley, CA are in a second rendering layer.
While the author might easily be flexible on licensing, the base maps and associated configuration data are licensed by the University of California Regents. See the Licence file in the repo. Apparently they're "free use" unless you want to make a profit.
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Volunteers welcome!
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Merging dots to remove overlaps by agglomerative clustering is an interesting and surprisingly tough task. Doing it optimally by any commonsense metric is NP hard. A cool project for a rainy day. Update: It rained last weekend so the Ruby gem Lulu now exists to solve this problem.
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The zip code data CSV file is about 3x the necessary size. But the extra fields might come in handy, so we're leaving them for now. Loading is slow, though. Up to 5 seconds on my old MacBook. Should we save a marshaled version and try loading that first? Update: Did this too, but it will only work if the application has write permission in the gem store.